Write-O-Rama Winter 2022
Write-O-Rama is your chance to try out several workshops offered by Hugo House teachers all in one writing-packed day! Sample Hugo House classes, meet our teachers, and try out genres and topics outside your purview without the pressure of registering for a full class. This season's event is presented in partnership with Secret Garden Books!
Event Overview
This winter's Write-O-Rama will be held virtually via Zoom. The first class begins at 12 pm. There are four class choices per 50-minute session. Choose your favorite, head to the virtual room in which it’s held, and the instructor will give a brief talk on the topic followed by a writing prompt or exercise. At the 50-minute mark, you can stay in the room or sign out and sign in to your next class of choice. You can view the full schedule below to choose one workshop per timeslot.
Admission
$60 gives you entry to Write-O-Rama and four workshops of your choice.
$100 gives you entry plus a discounted Hugo House membership, which is good for one year of early registration, class and event discounts, discounts at local bookstores, and other great benefits.
Ready to register? Registration is open now and available at the bottom of this page. Scroll away!
Registration ends two hours before the event, 10 am PT on Sunday, October 30, 2022.
Write-O-Rama Schedule – See the full schedule with class descriptions here!
Classes 12-1 pm PT
– You Have New DNA Relatives: Micro Prose with Darien Hsu Gee
– Give Your Story the Time of Day with Elise Hooper
– Techno-logic with Carolyn Abram
– 80 Flowers: Syntax as Music with Noah Zanella
Classes 1-2 pm PT
– Narrative Lists, Accumulations, and Explosions with Meghan Lamb
– Multisensory Detail: Scent and Touch with Anca L. Szilágyi
– Calvino's Memos as Muse with Cara Diaconoff
– Graphic Poetry with Nhatt Nichols
Classes 2-3 pm PT
– Prompts to Jumpstart Your Poems & Prose with Dilruba Ahmed
– Mixed Tapes, Playlists, and Soundtracks: Music in Fiction with Michael Overa
– Writing Scenes with Gail Folkins
– Literary Witchcraft with Allison Ellis and Amy Bowers
Classes 3-4 pm PT
– Turn Your Book Dream into Reality with Ingrid Ricks
– Instinct, Trust, Tension: How to Write Not-Your-Typical Story with Bella Bravo
– Building a Concept with Charles Mudede
– Poetry of Now: Write to the News with Aimee Suzara
Amy Bowers
Amy Bowers is a Florida native currently living in Connecticut with her family. Her writing explores art, domestic culture, the insect and natural worlds, and manufactured places and spaces. She is currently working on an essay collection about growing up in central Florida among amusement parks, alligators, and hurricanes. She holds an MFA in CNF from Bennington and has work published or forthcoming in [PANK], Washington Square Review, West Trade Review, OxMag, Farm-ish, Assay, and LA Review of Books. Her essay Manual is published (fall 2021) in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays, edited by Randon Billings Noble and published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Meghan Lamb
Meghan Lamb is the author of COWARD, Failure to Thrive, All of Your Most Private Places, and Silk Flowers. She is a lecturer at the University of Chicago and the nonfiction editor of Nat. Brut, a Whiting Award-winning journal. Go to http://meghanlamb.com/ for more information.
Nhatt Nichols
Nhatt Nichols is a poet and graphic journalist. A graduate of The Royal Drawing School, she uses comics to break down political and environmental issues, finding new ways to meet people where they are and ask them to reach deeper. Visit www.nhattnichols.com for more information. Or check out Nhatt's Instagram.
Noah Zanella
I am a nonbinary writer and musician from Chicago. I have an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. I was the recipient of the 2022 Elieen Lannan Academy of American Poets Prize. I'm trying not to miss it all.
Website: noahpzanella.wixsite.com/my-site
LinkedIn: Noah Zanella
Anca Szilágyi
Anca L. Szilágyi is the author of Daughters of the Air, which Shelf Awareness called “a striking debut ,” and Dreams under Glass, which Buzzfeed Books called "a novel for our modern times." Her writing appears in Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion Magazine, and Lilith Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of awards from Vermont Studio Center, Artist Trust, Hugo House, Jack Straw, 4Culture, and elsewhere. Originally from Brooklyn, she has lived in Montreal, Seattle, and now Chicago.
Twitter: @ancawrites
Instagram: @anca_szilagyi
Website: ancawrites.com
Michael Overa
Michael Overa was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and completed his MFA at Hollins University. He is a former Writers In The Schools Resident and Jack Straw Fellow. He's the author of two collections of short stories, This Endless Road and The Filled In Spaces. His work has appeared in the Portland Review, East Bay Review, and Inlandia, among others.
Aimee Suzara
Aimee Suzara is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and performer based in Oakland, CA whose mission is to create, and help others create, poetic and theatrical writing about race, gender, and the body to provoke dialogue and social change. Her debut poetry book, Souvenir (WordTech Editions 2014) was a finalist for the WILLA Award 2015, and her plays A History of the Body and Tiny Fires were finalist for the Bay Area Playwrights Festival 2015 and 2016. A YBCAway awardee and Spirited Woman Fellow (AROHO), her theater and performance work has been presented nationally and staged at Berkeley Repertory Theater, CounterPULSE, the World Theater, and Bindlestiff Studio and selected for PlayGround, United States of Asian America Festival, Emerging Performance Festival, The National One-Minute Play Festival, Utah Arts Festival, and APAture; she collaborated as a writer-performer with Deep Waters Dance Theater in 2007–2011 and with other groups such as the San Francisco State University University Dance Theater. She is a 4th season member of the Playground SF Writer's Pool at Berkeley Repertory Theater. An advocate for arts education, she has taught composition at Bay Area Colleges and Universities since 2006 and has offered workshops and coaching in creative writing since 2003. Visit www.aimeesuzara.net for more information.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aimeesuzarapoet/
Instagram: @aimeesuzara.artist
Carolyn Abram
Carolyn Abram is a Seattle-based writer. Her work tends to focus on the intersection of technology and everyday life. Her short fiction has appeared in various publications, including the New California Writing Anthology and The Offbeat. Her work has also appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Lilith. She is the author of eight editions of Facebook for Dummies. She holds degrees from Stanford and California College of the Arts.
Website: carolynabram.com
Dilruba Ahmed
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Her debut book of poetry, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Her poems have also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books), Literature: The Human Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas), and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of The Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
Website: www.dilrubaahmed.com
Instagram: dilruba_ahmed20, https://www.instagram.com/dilruba_ahmed20/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dilruba.ahmed Web: https://www.dilrubaahmed.com/writing-lab
Gail Folkins
Gail Folkins often writes about her deep roots in the American West. She is the author of two creative nonfiction books from Texas Tech University Press: a Pacific Northwest memoir titled Light in the Trees (2016), and Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit (2007), which was a popular culture finalist in ForeWord Review’s 2007 Book of the Year Awards. Folkins’ essay “A Palouse Horse” was a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2010. Her essays and poetry have appeared in publications such as River Teeth Journal – Beautiful Things, North Dakota Quarterly, Wisconsin Life, Texas Highways, and Wildflower Magazine. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, St. Edward’s University (Austin), and Austin Community College. Teaching philosophy: My goal is to further understanding of craft while also encouraging expression of students’ unique voices. Students have praised my workshop format and student-centered approach. Students learn to not only share a narrative, but to also explore their experiences and discoveries. I encourage students to read as writers, meaning focusing on elements of craft in addition to literary themes. Writers I return to: Edward Abbey, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Kim Barnes, Rick Bass, Dennis Covington, Louise Erdrich, Ernest Hemingway, Pico Iyer, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Favorite writing advice: Find the extraordinary in the everyday.
Ingrid Ricks
Ingrid Ricks is an NYT-bestselling memoir author, writing coach, and inspirational speaker who is passionate about leveraging personal storytelling to foster healing, awareness, empathy, and change. Over the past decade, she has helped thousands of students of every age find healing and empowerment by writing the deeply personal stories they needed to tell, and has produced eight anthologies in partnership with high schools and non-profits. Ingrid, who views personal storytelling as the key to healing and unity in today’s divided world, regularly presents her Healing Through Personal Storytelling workshops in partnership with organizations throughout the region and has delivered keynote talks on the subject to educators and social workers nationwide. Ingrid’s books include the coming-of-age memoir, Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story, and Focus, a memoir about her journey with the blinding eye disease Retinitis Pigmentosa. She has also ghostwritten several memoirs and has shared stories from her childhood on Salon and NPR.
Charles Tonderai Mudede
Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born writer, filmmaker, and cultural critic. He writes about film, books, music, crime, art, economics, and urban theory for The Stranger. Mudede has made three films, two of which, Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one, Zoo, was screened at Cannes. Mudede has written for the New York Times, Arcade Journal, Cinema Scope, Ars Electronica, the Village Voice, Radical Urban Theory, and C Theory. Mudede is also on the editorial board for the Black Scholar, which is based at the University of Washington, and between 1999 and 2005, lectured on post-colonial theory at Pacific Lutheran University, and in 2003 published a short book, Last Seen, with Diana George. Mudede has lived in Seattle since 1989.
Cara Diaconoff
Cara Diaconoff is the author of Unmarriageable Daughters: Stories and a novel, I’ll Be a Stranger to You. Her fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at Bellevue College. For more information check out Cara's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/caradiaconoff/.
Darien Hsu Gee
Darien Hsu Gee is the author of five novels published by Penguin Random House that have been translated into eleven languages. In 2022, she served as executive editor for Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World. In 2021, her collection of micro essays, Allegiance, received the Bronze IPPY award (Essays). Her poetry chapbook, Other Small Histories, won the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship award, judged by Patricia Smith. In 2015, she received the Hawaiʻi Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence for her nonfiction book, Writing the Hawaiʻi Memoir. Darien lives with her family on the island of Hawaiʻi.
Websites: dariengee.com and writer-ish.com
Elise Hooper
A native New Englander, Elise Hooper spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting an MA and teaching high-school literature and history. She now lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters. Previous novels include The Other Alcott and Learning to See.
